My parents are both rural, uh, Church of Ireland. My father’s from Cork, from a small town called Midleton, where my grandfather was headmaster of the local school. And my mother was, ah, or still is from Killarney, in Kerry, and her father was a draper — ran a shop there. And, um, they met in university in Dublin and set up house there, and that’s where I came from, I suppose. So, uh, so we be a Munster Protestant background, um, sort of small, middle, middle business-class kind of people. And um, I was yeah born and brought up in Dublin, and uh, went to school there, was away for a short while in the States bef- … just before going back to university, and, um, and I’ve … basically I’ve been here ever since. So, yeah, to my horror, I’ve been in Ireland almost all my life, but I mix with a very, very erudite crowd. I grew up in South Dublin; Fox Rock is what my parents used to always call it, because that was where Sam Beckett it was born, and, um, we were mortified of that, so we called it Dean’s Grange, um, which makes more sense ‘cause they built a huge motorway that actually cuts you off from Fox Rock anyway, so … You get killed if you go to Fox Rock now, but, um, yeah boring, south, m … Dublin suburbs basically. Well, I suppose th- … their uniqueness becomes more apparent the older you get. I used to think it was just a normal, boring suburban existence. Now I see it was truly lurid and insane in terms of the drabness of those estates and the lack of infrastructure. And we used to break our windows playing cricket and soccer and rugby, um, but to our astonishment, I think it was only quite recently, um, I think we kept breaking the same one because, uh, he guys who put in double glazing, uh, announced solemnly that, uh, we’d been ripped off. And then when they put the windows in the original house they used picture frame glass, which is only a whatever quarter of the thickness that you’re supposed to do. And this stuff, you could break it with your finger! And how we ever broke the big panes, I don’t know. But apparently, we used to just keep breaking the ones, so they never noticed that we were … It was just a homing device for the cricket ball. Obviously you can do a lot of damage with it, but uh …

TRANSCRIBED BY: Rose Mignano

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 02/06/2008

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

The population of the Protestant community in the Republic of Ireland
is only 2 or 3 percent of the population and has been declining since Irish Independence. Irish Protestants tend to be middle class but have no distinctive accent features. Apart from two academic years spent in New Mexico Michael has lived all his life in the city.

Some things to note

• Dublin accents are clear indicators of class; however, it’s a serious
misunderstanding about Dublin that the city divides clearly in class and
accents between the northern and southern sides of the city. The subject is a
Southsider and has a typical middle-class accent but much of the south side of
the city is working class and conversely there are middle class areas on the
north side.

• Although the subject would be heard as quite posh in Dublin (an accent which
might be described in Dublin as “West British”) it’s distinguished from more
working-class Dublin accents by a greater degree of rhoticity; thus a working
class Dubliner would drink a pint of [pat̪ɐ] – a pint of porter – but the subject
would drink [pɒɹtəɹ].

• He occasionally uses t̪ for θ, a typical feature of many Irish accents, but notice
that this phoneme is always dentalised; a common mistake in the performance
of Irish accents is the production of t for θ.

• He uses x in Foxrock – [fɒksɹɒkx]; this is not a typical Dublin pronunciation.

COMMENTARY BY: Robert Price

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

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Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.

In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech. In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list). The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure(currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

For instructional materials or coaching in the accents and dialects represented here, please go to Other Dialect Services.

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